Who knows how one thought flows into the next and what ultimately got me to thinking about this, but it occurred to me tonight just what a dying breed the professional photographer has become.
Take a peek at Flickr at all the amature photographs. It wouldn't be unusual to find a gem or two among the pedestrian pictures of persons.
Everyone seems to have access to a camera now, even our cell phones often have cameras, so going away are the days when someone would say, "If only I had a camera right now." And of course the cameras themselves have gotten so much sparter -- no need for the professional's eye and knowledge of f-stops and shutter speeds. Nanotechnology does it for us.
The result is that so many ordinary people are finding those extraordinary photos. We don't need the top-dollar professional to either set-up that great looking shot or shoot the gazillion photos for that one good image. Those good images are at our finger-tips on the web and can usually be downloaded (dragged and dropped or right-clicked and saved-as) to our own computers and printed out fresh.
So what do we have? A new breed of amatures? A dying breed of professionals? Something in between? The Amfessionals? The Promatures?
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Why the picture of Wonder Woman and the Big Banana? Why not? Somebody took the picture and I downloaded, proving that you can find and borrow just about any picture you can possibly imagine ... and then some.
It's an interesting comment. Lots of high school kids do their own (or have friends or relatives) graduation pictures nowadays instead of going through a professiional studio. And many of them are just as good.
ReplyDeleteDo they supply their own wheelbarrows? Didn't Hulk used to mock people, "sitting in wheelbarrows?"
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